Lech Walesa Quotes

The question is always 'What is the role of a labor movement?' How much is about collective bargaining, how much is about social change for all workers?

What shall the workers do? Sit idly by and see the vast resources of nature and the human mind be utilized and monopolized for the benefit of the comparative few? No. The laborers must learn to think and act, and soon, too, that only by the power of organization, and common concert of action, can either their manhood be maintained, their rights to life (work to sustain it) be recognized, and liberty and rights secured.

Trade unions are a force for good - a force for a more equal society.

Let the workers organize. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of Labor is the future of America.

I'm a lifelong believer in trade unionism.

Historians have often censored civil rights activists' commitment to economic issues and misrepresented the labor and civil rights movements as two separate, sometimes adversarial efforts. But civil rights and workers' rights are two sides of the same coin.

The labor movement has a great role to play in our country today.

And I think we understand we cannot make social change for all workers until we have enough strength, membership strength, and at the same time having membership strength and only making change for a limited group of workers is not what our country really needs for people that work.

I believe in trade unionism, and I believe in democracy, in democratic trade unionism.

Unions are about the collective leverage, the power of numbers versus the power of capital.

We are with you in this work. Workingmen must form a party of their own, take charge of the government, dispose gilded fraud, and put honest toil in power.

I'm a big believer in the value of labor unions and with what collective effort gets people.

Trade unionism is not a discovery or a formula. It grew and evolved slowly out of the needs of human experience.

The Labor Community is carrying on … a very significant and instructive struggle.

In Russia the workers are powerless, kept in spiritual as well as physical bondage. The American workers are free to take up the fight, free to act, to read, to publish, to discuss, to instruct themselves, to combine in unions, to assemble in meeting, to strike. Hence it is only here [America] that the fight for peace can begin…. The [solution] consists in mass-actions of American workers against capitalist power. If they should proceed to wrench the decision on policy from big capital, the most essential step to deter the threat of atomic war would be made

Solidarity Forever

Duty of the Catholic Worker to Join Organized Labor

Power? Nine workers out of ten still unorganized, and union dues going to bribe middle class politicians. You call that power?

It's impossible to write the history of freedom in this country without telling how trade unions have contributed to it.

The labor movement has lifted more people out of poverty than all the programs in the country.

That's the Rebel Girl, That's the Rebel Girl. To the working class she's a precious pearl. She brings courage, pride and joy To the fighting Rebel Boy We've had girls before, but we need some more In the Industrial Workers of the World For it's great to fight for freedom With a Rebel Girl

And if you are going to truly stand with workers, it also means embracing solidarity, not attempting through lame talking points to pit union workers against non-union workers.

If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I'll walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America, because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.

The labor movement was the principal force that transforme­d misery and despair into hope and progress.

The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old age pensions, government relief for the destitute, and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival but a tolerable life.